Junkyard Orthopedics

A mentor of mine says, “A piece of exercise equipment is valuable in inverse proportion to its cost.” Meaning that if you spend $5000 on a Bowflex machine, you will receive no benefit from it, but an implement you make for $1 will be almost invaluable.

Like Excalibur, this piece of equipment, fit for a hero, cost its user $0.00.

By that measure, this is my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

With a few days before The Great Ruck-Off to rehab dinged up joints, I reached into my disused bag of powerlifting tricks and pulled out the grand old Tire Sled. The most important tool for powerlifters after a barbell, the sled mends broken bodies by pumping blood and synovial fluid through overstressed joints with moderate work and light poundages. And just like yoga, it wakes up the stabilizing muscles of the thorax, elbows and knees, and shoulder and hip girdles and teaches them to coordinate in funky, unaccustomed combinations.

To accomplish that, you just pull the sled up and down the block in every conceivable way: forward, back, sidestepping, cross-stepping, bent over double, one-handed or two-, hands overhead or thrust out front or behind your back or between your legs, rowing, pressing, extending, curling, whatever. The sled is to the horizontal plane what the kettlebell is to the vertical plane: endlessly versatile and wonderfully therapeutic. To paraphrase what powerlifting great Donny Thompson says about kettlebells, the sled works the tissues without killing them.

There is nothing to count here: no sets, reps, or poundages. This is just active recovery. You pull it, work up a lather, get pleasantly tired, and then go happily about the rest of your day.

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Published by Dog in Chief

The Dog in Chief writes about the flourishing of embodied souls. In practice, that means a lot of content about exercise, the outdoors, strength, and the comedy of errors called cultivating character and happiness.
In his innermost life, the Dog is a serious Buddhist--crappy and disobedient, but still very serious--and writes about such things professionally. In this blog they are seldom at center stage, but they are usually nearby in the background.
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